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Gerald Mead: New Assemblages at Studio Hart

Some assemblage required

Assemblage is the three-dimensional cousin of collage, the process of imbuing innocent objects with new, often unexpected meaning. The potential of modern assemblage has been evident at least since Joseph Cornell began infusing his surreal shadow boxes will all the spatial ennui of a De Chirico side street. Gerald Mead has long been a practitioner of this art of the found object, and is currently showing recent assemblages at Studio Hart through Saturday, October 11 (65 Allen Street, 536-8337 / studiohart.com).

Zoology, assemblage by Gerald Mead, on view at Studio Hart.

The exhibition begins with an apparent demonstration of the first few steps in the assemblage process: collecting and codifying. Conversational Sculptures consists of a framed grid of small Ziploc bags, each housing a found object and bearing the date of its acquisition. Random stuff, both natural and human-made, populates this collection: a dime, drawn and quartered, the elegant S-curve of a cardboard shaving, fragments of paper, including a fortune cookie fortune—all are presented like rare insect specimens. But Mead actually is showing his process here, more than his product. To pursue assemblage, you have to be willing to do what your mother may have told you not to: pick stuff up off the street. “You don’t know where that’s been,” Mom may have said. Mead’s answer might be, “Precisely.” Taken out of context, even the most mundane object can take on new life as an accidental sculpture or “conversation piece.” The grid of baggies in Conversational Sculptures is incomplete, suggesting that the artist’s scavenging continues and can, in fact, become an obsession.

Mead offers essays on the process of assemblage in two other pieces: Celebrifacts /6/ and MFA (Class of 2008) Portrait. In both works, individuals are represented by tiny reliquaries consisting of test tubes or vials. In the case of MFA (Class of 2008) Portrait, the tubes contain a fingerprint and small objects (artist’s materials, organic fragments, plastic toys) that must, given the title, represent Mead’s fellow MFA students from UB. Each tube is labeled with the fellow artist’s initials and studio number, i.e. “AM-214B.” The biographical sampling recorded in this work results in a thoroughly conceptual group portrait. The assemblage conveys a detachment from the normally psychologically charged genre of portraiture—a detachment that may be driven by Mead’s process and personal obsession with ephemera, but is also refreshingly direct and amusing in its hyper-analytical approach.

Celebrifacts /6/ is Mead as passive paparazzo. Six test tubes hold “guess who” slices of celebrity faces from magazines. Each capsule includes a small fragment of lint or cloth and is labeled with cryptic, lower case initials, adding to the game of name-that-star. But the point here perhaps is not to identify the celebrities sampled—in this case, less directly than with MFA (Class of 2008) Portrait—but rather to contemplate the ubiquitous American pastime of celebrity watching (and worship). Whether it’s a nightly addiction to The Insider or a casual glance at the tabloids in the supermarket checkout, we all participate in a measure of celebrity sampling. Mead may be acting as an assemblage stalker with this work, but his project is one that we can identify with as a pleasure, guilty or otherwise.

From the trivial to the sublime, Mead takes-on one of the most familiar and dramatic subjects in all of Western art: the Passion of Christ. Selections from the Via Crucis series represent various Stations of the Cross through what Mead calls, appropriately, “enshrined collages.” These tiny tabernacles each contain a miniscule plastic charm depicting a scene from the Passion which is almost lost amidst multi-layered compositions of Old Master crucifixion scenes and assorted detritus, all delicately shrouded by small panes of glass and mica-like wafers. Each composition is completed by a glass pipette that bisects the assemblage at a right angle, forming a cross. The pipettes, appropriated from an art conservation lab, also serve to enliven the composition by distorting each tableau as the eye moves across it. Via Crucis X stands out as the most sculptural piece in the series. Again, the plastic Passion souvenir is relegated to a bottom corner. This time, the trinket depicts a moment of shame as Christ’s robe is removed. This scene is juxtaposed with a glass tube housing an image of a nude male model, for an effect reminiscent of certain photographic assemblages Robert Mapplethorpe. The rest of the composition is dedicated to a large square of purplish-gray felt—perhaps a dual reference to the allegorical color of Christ’s robes and the gray flannel suits of many a 20th-century Everyman. Via Crucis X, like the rest of the series, confronts this traditional subject with ironic bricolage and subtle shades of irreverent humor.

In Memoriam: One Mead Lane is the most ambitious work in the exhibition, both in terms of the collection of assets required, and the way they are manipulated and presented. A worn blueprint of Mead’s family home, a modernist house by Leslie (James) Halfpenny, is overlaid by mylar with notations by the artist documenting various architectural features and fragments of the collective family biography. These run the gamut from the whimsical (Brady Bunch style staircase in foyer) to the confidential (Tom would smoke in secret in this corner) to the poignant (Mom’s bed on which she died, July 6, 1999). On a pedestal in front of this annotated blueprint is a balance with a small, layered cube on one side. The cube, the artist explained, consists of building materials gathered from the family home and compressed into a sort of material microcosm of the house; carpeting, plaster, wallpaper and shingles are layered in the order they were found on the various floors of the house. The other side of the balance is empty, suggesting that this elaborate, time and labor-intensive attempt to memorialize a building full of childhood memories ultimately has no mass or meaning. But as with many of Mead’s assemblages, In Memoriam is essentially about the meditative process of the work, a type of art-making that parallels the ongoing search we are all compelled to make: the search for evidence of our selves and of those around us in a random array of cast-off, inanimate objects.

eric jackson-forsberg

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